perfidy

If I feel better tomorrow, I will attempt to fuuuuse together Mike's and my two threads into one beautiful Gordian knot of logical syllogism. In brief, it's the damn hippies who got us in this postmodern crisis of academia, and Generation Y are the first wave of students who may never have been exposed to any other pedagogical method.

I would like to go further into this, but I am tired. I didn't sleep much last night, and when I did sleep, I dreamt that I had been abducted and was being given a tour of the mansion-cum-abbatoir where I would soon be killed and eaten. I was just being shown the hook from which I would be hung to be tortured, die and age before being made into a variety of supposedly delicious dishes, when I woke to my alarm. So I'm really damn tired.

As a result, the best I can do in the way of synthesis is this link via Eric Muller, On the Couch With Beavis and Butthead. Besides being hilarious, it sums up perfectly why a little theory in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing. Let's excerpt, shall we!

During the video viewing segments of Beavis and Butthead, they are shown sitting on a couch at Butthead's house. Our viewpoint is as if we are staring out from inside the television which they are watching. However, the possible mise en abyeme effect of Beavis and Butthead watching the television viewer watching them watch television, the feedback loop of (virtual) camera and screen evoking Lacan's Mirror Stage, where the child learns to watch himself watching himself, is not exploited here. Instead, Beavis and Butthead are positioned as analysands. They sit on the couch, in the state of regression described by theorists of the cinematic apparatus (Baudry 698-699), and free associate in response to the music videos, a genre which Marsha Kindler and E. Ann Kaplan have both closely connected to the dreamwork (Kinder 12-14; Kaplan 28). . . .
The single most jaw-dropping moment for the psychoanalytically informed viewer in all the Beavis and Butthead episodes comes in the episode entitled "Steamroller." Our heroes are watching a music video by the eccentric Scandinavian singer Bjork when Beavis blurts out: "I heard Bjork has a schlong." Butthead stammers, and asks where Beavis heard this. Beavis claims it was "the guy in the bathroom." After a few more questions, it becomes clear to everyone except Beavis that "the guy in the bathroom" is Beavis' own reflection.
It is a cliche of Lacanian cultural criticism that any appearance of a mirror must evoke the mirror stage, but surely Beavis' failure to recognize himself, coupled with his reflection telling him that Bjork (a small woman) has a "schlong" (a word chosen, surely, over all other possible penis euphemisms for its incorporation of the word "long"), deserves such analysis. It fundamentally ties Beavis' incomprehension of sexual difference to anality (as described in the last section) to his failure to accept the boundedness of his body. In the mirror stage, the infant recognizes that subjectivity is limited to the surface of the body and agency to the reach of its limbs and voice. Previously, the child has no sense of a world outside, but is total ego, thinking of itself as the entire universe, understanding existence only as immediate sensation. . . .
The threat of castration, represented by Woman's lack, is essential to subject formation, and Beavis is clearly outside of this system. Not only does his reflection tell him Bjork has a "schlong," but when he and Butthead watch another video, which features a (supposedly) nude woman in a bathtub, Butthead expresses the hope that the woman will stand up, revealing her body to them. Beavis thinks that she will not, speculating that "she's embarrassed because she has a stiffie." Butthead attempts to explain that women cannot get erections, but the existence of humans without penises is unimaginable to Beavis.

Indeed! Read the entire thing!